DANTE – INVENTION OF CELEBRITY
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
September 17th 2021 to January 9th 2022
Curated by Professor Gervase Rosser as part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, the exhibition marked the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri's death and explored his enduring influence on literature, art and culture. Developed in collaboration with TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities) and the Ashmolean Museum, the exhibition brought together historic works alongside contemporary artistic responses to The Divine Comedy.
As part of the exhibition, Ai-Da presented a series of artworks inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy and gave a live poetry recital generated using her AI language model. Responding specifically to The Circle of the Envious (Purgatorio XIII), the poem explored themes of perception, identity and morality while examining the relationship between artificial intelligence, language and human creativity.
By placing an AI-generated artistic response alongside one of the foundational works of European literature, the exhibition invited audiences to consider how emerging technologies may reshape creative practice and cultural expression. Ai-Da's artworks and poetry questioned what distinguishes human creativity from machine-generated creativity, while reflecting on the nature of language, vision and human relationships in an age increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence.
Ai-Da's response to Dante marked the beginning of an extended body of work exploring The Divine Comedy, themes that would later be developed further in her 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition Leaping into the Metaverse. Through painting, poetry and performance, these works used Dante's writing as a lens through which to examine the ethical and philosophical questions raised by rapidly advancing technologies.
Media
Professor Rosser's article: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-09-21-dante-and-the-robot-an-encounter-at-the-ashmolean
Ashmolean Director Dr Xa Sturgis introducing Ai-Da
Exhibition Head Professor Gervais Rosser with researcher Lucy Seal, Aidan Meller and Ashmolean Director Dr Xa Sturgis
Ai-Da with Ashmolean Director Dr Xa Sturgis
Ai-Da Robot with Aidan Meller, researcher Lucy Seal and Exhibition Head Gervais Rosser
Ai-Da with BBC Click's Lara Lewington
Ai-Da looking at a Turner painting
Ai-Da looking at a portrait of art critic John Ruskin